More Photoshop fun!

I was showing a friend what I could do in Photoshop and I created this striking picture right before his eyes. I used the poster edges filter on just the land and, again, I pasted a different sky with a new wild color into the bland sky of the original picture. Maybe this could become a series or a calender idea. Hmmmmmmm!

A Night in the Park

I had a lot of time off before my next assignment and almost wasted my chance to get up to Yosemite and get some more pictures of my favorite place on this planet. (I'm sure there's bigger canyons and more colorful places on other planets.)

I picked a place that I had been to before, many years ago with my friend Euell. And, true to form, that day was amazing for taking pictures. This time was no diffeent, either. I wanted to be on top of the very easy Mount Watkins by mid-afternoon. Accessible from the Tioga Pass Road (Highway 120), Mount Watkins is an easy 2 mile hike from Olmstead Point, the famous overlook that everyone stops at on their way up to the high country and Tuolumne Meadows. Being right across Tenaya Canyon from Cloud's Rest and Half Dome, Mount Watkins offers close-up views like nowhere else in Yosemite. As you can see in this picture below, the view of Half Dome is much different than you're used to seeing. Somehow, I think it looks much more impressive from this direction.

I always marvel at the smooth glacial-polished granite near the Quarter Domes and Cloud's Rest. A huge glacier once came down Tenaya Canyon and scoured it clean of any soil that was once here, millions of years ago. The combination of ice and sand will, literally, polish the rock very smooth. In this picture, I like the diagonal ledges and the smooth granite. Might be an adventure to explore (with ropes, of course!).

This peak was discovered by the famous mountain explorer, and Federal employee, Clarence King. He was one of the first explorers in the Sierra Nevada, braving the wilds of the times and risking death at every turn. Look for his book someday, written in something like 1873 (I can't remember the title). King named this peak "The Obelisk", for obvious reasons. Topping out at over 11,000 feet, and not being on the Sierra Crest, makes this peak really stand out. Eventually, the peak was named after Gaylen Clark, another Sierra explorer.

Speaking of the Sierra Crest, here is Mount Conness, which sits squarely atop Yosemite's high country. Conness sits so high that even glaiers could not touch it, The old volcanic deposits still cling to the peaks and ridges. I used the powerful 10X zoom to get this close to the peak. I had hoped for a colorful sunset but, I had to settle for the evening's light instead.

Finally, here's the picture I came up here for. It's the perfect angle to capture the light of what some photographers call "the golden hour" (the hour before sunset and the hour after sunrise). I waited for the last possible moment to capture that light, as you can see, the shadow had begun creeping up the face of Half Dome.

Photoshopping

I decided to try my hand at surrealistic photoshopping. It just doesn't seem enough that I shoot "natural abstracts". Nope, I guess I have to explore my own twisted sense of beauty. In this uncompleted work, I took one of my Crater Lake shots and did a couple of artistic filters on it. I then took the sky from another picture and made it to look like sunset, then pasted it into the original sky, stretching it from corner to corner. I felt I needed some extra color in the middle of the picture so I've started some handpainting of trees back to a greener color. I'm still considering what to do with the water. I'm thinking I need to give it a bit of a tint to match the sky, as reflections do.

To Be continued!!

More Oregon fun!

For the Holiday, I went over to the Oregon Coast, as usual, to see my Mom. She was very happy to see me, as none of her other sons or grandchildren came up to see her this year.

This first picture is a "leftover" from my last trip to Crater Lake. I tried to frame the viw of the Phantom Ship with natural items in the field of view. I'm not exactly happy with many of the photos I took on that trip. It seems that I should've had more really eye-catching, spetacular pictures but, I can find things wrong with so many from this batch.

Here's another "leftover" that could use some "tweaking" of the original exposure. I'm finding out that many of the pictures I take have fundamental problems with contrast. I attribute this to my Fuji's automatic mode. I'm sure there's lots of ways to correct this stuff like spot metering and manual mode exposure control. Dayum, I gotta find that camera manual!

This picture below still has the potential to be one of my best ones taken that day. I'll have to play around with it a bit.

OK, yesterday I was coming back from Mom's, driving along Oregon Route 38, which crosses the Cascades through the Diamond Lake area. The road is so incredibly scenic and typically Oregon, with lots of old growth forests, an impressive major river and geologic wonders at almost every turn. I stopped for a rest at Clearwater Falls, a campground and picnic area in the Umpqua National Forest, and snapped off a few pics that tickled my fancy. These very tall Douglas-fir trees top out at over 200 feet tall.

Now, we get into the high country, returning to views of the 9000 foot ancient volcano called Mount Thielsen and Diamond Lake. There's a very nice bike trail that connects several campgrounds on the west shore of Diamond Lake. It looks like a great place for a weeklong campout. (Hint, hint, Mrs. Zig!) As I said in a previous posting, I climbed that peak back in '84. You can see the route we went up, as it goes diagonally from the lower right corner up to the peak.

Here's a zoomed-in closeup of the spectacular Mt. Thielsen. The last final 80 feet at the summit pinnacle was where we climbed, using the ropes, harnesses and hardware to safely climb above a 2000 sheer drop-off. That upper-most portion of the left-hand side of the pinnacle was the class 4 route my climbing partner wanted to climb. The regular route follows the right-hand side of the pinnacle. Both routes are NOT for the scared-of-heights crowd... heh heh.